Photographer Ivan McClellan grew up watching Western movies and Bonanza reruns, and going to rodeos with his family in Kansas City. But as a kid, he never saw earnest depictions of cowboys that looked like him. “I didn’t know a thing about Black cowboys,” says McClellan in a recent interview with the Mercury. Any depictions of Black cowboys he did see were as “a punchline”—Sinbad in The Cherokee Kid, or Cowboy Curtis on Pee Wee’s Playhouse. “What if a Black guy was a cowboy? It was like a joke.” That changed six years ago when McClellan, who now lives in Portland, went to Okmulgee's Invitational Rodeo in Oklahoma, which is billed as the nation’s oldest African American rodeo. McClellan was invited by Portland filmmaker Charles Perry, who made a documentary about the rodeo. He was skeptical at first, but that changed when he arrived at the rodeo on a 105 degree day, and “saw Black people everywhere.”